I have to work on my English.
English was not my favorite topic at school. I have a talent for languages, but I am very bad at learning vocabulary. I can pick up languages not too bad when I am living surrounded by the language for some time. I adapt to speaking English, or better, my kind of English, pretty fast. I only lack everything I should have been taught (I wrote “teached” here at the first try :}) at school: grammar, punctuation and a general confidence in the written word.
Since my favorite authors are all natively writing in English, I learned, while slowly expanding my vocabulary, how difficult and sometimes bad German translations are, I started reading in English a lot. Most of the advanced books in my hobby (computers), study (physics) and work (computers again) are in English. I have to know it, if I want to inform myself on the things I am interested in.
So reading English is not the problem.
Speaking, mmmh … I can make myself understood. Only my accent — can I still call that an accent? — makes very clear, I am not even coming near speaking the real language. Speaking English was not really endorsed in my school time.
Writing? The horror starts. I am not this bad, I hope. I just manage to do all the beginners faults, which I should not do, over and over again. I somehow can not connect what I read, with what I write.
This is partly due to my kind of reading. I am not a “thoughtfull” reader. I read. I am not analysing the book while reading. When I read an English book, I read it for the content. The informations, the insights and mostly the entertainment. I am not reading to improve my English.
Another part of the problem is my inadequate understanding of my own mother tongue. I have, luckily, German as my native language. Luckily, because German is supposed to be the most difficult “European” language. Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese all bring another level of complication with a new way of writing. I started to learn Arabic, but could not organize enough time to keep up with the rest of the course, who all needed the language for their job in some way and work with a different dedication. Learning a new alphabet together with your chosen language is not helping. I fully agree on German being difficult to learn, though. So many rules, so many little edges. Especially compared to English:
- “der, die, das” oppsed to “the”
- “Du, Sie” instead of “you”
- “Viele Großschreibungen” opposed to “almost everything small caps” (Hi, Aaron :) )
- some additional letters, while being considered cool in gamer circles, are difficult to understand and get right for non-natives. (ö ä ü ß)
So, for a first language, German is not the worst choice.
It still helps if you understand where you come from when you want to go somewhere. If you do not know what Akkusativ, Dativ and Genitiv mean, (I am not joking) it is kinda hard to understand Plusquamperfect, Future II and tenses in if sentences.
I wondered a long time, why I am this bad at languages. I am pretty communicative and a fast learning person (at least during school). I blame it 60% on me, for not being stubborn enough to put some effort into it, despite the obstacles. The remaining 40% I blame on my teachers.
My German teacher for the first 2 years in Gymnasium, which is where you are supposed to learn the real theory was a joke. A running joke. I doubt we ever did one coherent lesson. She was a gentle person with no authority and the German system did carry her through 40 years of teaching without getting any pupil anywhere. Nobody complained about her, since she was too nice to give bad marks. So no German theory until 11th grade, when I got a real teacher who was shocked by our lacking grasp of the language. He was speechless for 5 minutes.
My English teachers changed every year and with them the teaching system. Completely. Since every teacher was teaching on a different schedule, despite there being written down schedules, we left out important parts. We never came back to them. So when the “higher” grammar came, I was lacking the basics for understanding that. Others got back and relearned what they needed. I was to annoyed to do that. Or too dumb, you decide. Most of my current English, I blame on being in England for some weeks, being in the US for 4 months, KDE, reading everything Frank Herbert, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Oppenheimer and many others have written in their native English. I forgot J.K. Rowling. “The Goblet of Fire” took me 12 hours. One night shift at the accelerator and I was working inbetween.
I was in Taize several times. I learned that mastering a language is not the goal. You have to be able to communicate. I had a wonderful time there talking to Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, English and many other people. We understood each other. I loved it.
So I got some confidence in English. I still think I know more English than 90% of my year today. I am one of the few people of my year who spend big part of their everyday in an English environment. I just learned lately, that I am not good enough.
I reached a point where my vocabulary and grammer no longer match the thoughts I want to express. I do not have the mastery of the language I need to write what I want to say.
I started looking for advanced English courses, but everything I found is either not payable for me (personal trainer) or far below (VHS) or beyond my level. What I need is a speech trainer and somebody hammering the grammar in but I can not afford that. I am now looking for courses abroad. They are mostly for people up to 21 which is a bit below my age. :)
So, any tips where I can look for improving my English. English standard books about grammar which are not too dry to read? Any interest in founding a “English Stammtisch” where some native speakers are correcting our speaking for a free beer? ;)
Improving my English is one of my long term goals.
